Departure

To a traveler there are few words that can strike them with fear and stress as much as “Flight Delayed: Now departing at ____.” These words result in pounding heart and rushing blood as the wayward traveler calculates the time until their next connection, or the chances of the luggage and themselves making it to their final destination.

This anxiety is only multiplied by several factors when the flight is international.

A snowstorm arrived in Colorado Thursday and sat its tremendous bulk upon the Front Range. It dropped about half a foot or so in the Fort Collins area and kept up a near continuous pelting of the Denver area.

In response to these conditions I booked a shuttle to DIA (Denver International Airport) and arrived at the airport around 3:30pm, roughly 4 hours before my flight. Checked my luggage and breezed through the non-existent security line. The first flight to LA where I would connect to Qantas was on time.

That is it was on time until about 6:30 when the Chicago flight before the LA one had a delay, and then caused the returning LA plane to be delayed. Then there was the de-icing, which took about an hour. All in all despite following the recommendations for international travelers, our plane was two hours late arriving in LA. This left us (the passengers on the plane) 10 min or less to catch our connecting flights.

The other Denver Australearn students and I made our flight and even our luggage was in Brisbane to greet us. Luggage re-checked, the pack of American students made their way to Cairns.

We were greeted by our Australearn staff and bussed to accommodations at Gilligan’s backpacker hostel. There we were placed in rooms according to university destinations and given our first session in the Bridging Cultures Program.

Dinner was around the corner at Union Jack’s. The food was very edible and there was even some live music in the form of two guys on guitars playing pop songs.

While all of us had come from every corner of the USA, Maine to Cali and Alaska to Hawaii, we all were dead tired by 8pm standard eastern Australian time.

And I am pretty sure that is the earliest any of us has gone to bed for a very, very long time.